The novel is essential reading for scholars, critics and general readers interested in the political and social crisis of late-Victorian Britain, the means by which writers of the time represented it, and the ways in which subsequent readers have interpreted it in relation to their own times.

The novel is essential reading for scholars, critics and general readers interested in the political and social crisis of late-Victorian Britain, the means by which writers of the time represented it, and the ways in which subsequent readers have interpreted it in relation to their own times.